Offices Held

Biography

Edward Popham was almost certainly trained at the Middle Temple, of which his father, his brother John and his sons Alexander, Ferdinand and John were all members in their time. In July 1551 his father settled on him and his wife lands worth £18 a year, and on his father’s death five years later he succeeded to a considerable patrimony in and around Bridgwater. In 1558 he brought a Star Chamber case against two Salisbury merchants and two Londoners for their alleged attempt to dispossess him of the manor of Milton, Somerset, which he had recently bought: among those who gave evidence were two of Popham’s servants and his brother John, and he probably won the case as he was holding the manor when he died.3

Although both brothers were to sit in the Parliament of 1558, neither did so for Bridgwater, which chose two townsmen. Edward Popham’s return for Guildford, a borough with which he had no known tie and where his name is inserted in the indenture in a different hand from that of the document, he must have owed to his kinship with Sir Thomas Stradling, whose master the 12th Earl of Arundel exercised patronage there. Popham supplanted the Protestant William More to join a local Catholic, William Hammond; his own connexion with the conservative Stradlings suggests that, at least under Mary, Popham conformed without difficulty. He was to sit in four Elizabethan Parliaments and died on 24 Jan. 1586.4

Ref Volumes: 1509-1558

Author: S. R. Johnson

Notes

1. Date of birth estimated from age at fa.’s i.p.m., C142/108/104. Vis. Som. (Harl. Soc. xi), 87-88, 125, where he is incorrectly shown as the third son; C142/211/56.